ith the author's greater work, _Lavengro_. Borrow was
naturally disappointed. He abused the critics and the public. Perhaps
he grew somewhat soured. He did not hesitate in _The Romany Rye_ to talk
candidly about those "ill-favoured dogs . . . the newspaper editors," and
he made the gentleman's gentleman of _Lavengro_ describe how he was
excluded from the Servants' Club in Park Lane because his master followed
a profession "so mean as literature." In fact as a reaction from the
unfriendly reception accorded to the _Romany Rye_--now one of the most
costly of his books in a first edition--he lost heart, and he grew to
despise the whole literary and writing class. Hence the various stories
presenting him in not very sympathetic guise, the story of Thackeray
being snubbed on asking Borrow if he had read the _Snob Papers_, of Miss
Agnes Strickland receiving an even more forcible rebuff when she offered
to send him her _Queens of England_. "For God's sake don't Madame; I
should not know where to put them or what to do with them." These
stories are in Gordon Hake's _Memoirs of Eighty Years_, but Mr. Francis
Hindes Groome has shown us the other side of the picture, and others also
to whom I shall refer a little later have done the same. Perhaps the
literary class is never the worse for a little plain speaking. The real
secret of Borrow is this--that he was a man of action turned into a
writer by force of circumstances.

The life of Borrow, unlike that of most famous men of letters, has not
been overwritten. His death in 1881 caused little emotion and attracted
but small attention in the newspapers. _The Times_, then as now so
excellent in its biographies as a rule, devoted but twenty lines to him.
Here I may be pardoned for being autobiographical. I was last in Norwich
in the early eighties. I had a wild enthusiasm for literature so far as
my taste had been directed--that is to say I read every book I came
across and had been doing so from my earliest boyhood. But I had never
heard of George Borrow or of his works. In my then not infrequent visits
to Norwich I cannot recall that his name was ever mentioned, and in my
life in London, among men who were, many of them, great readers, I never
heard of Borrow or of his achievement. He died in 1881, and as I do not
recall hearing his name at the time of his death or until long
afterwards, I must have missed certain articles in the _Athenaeum_--two
of them admirable "ap